The Golden Notebook
First published 1962 · English · 600 pages
- Novels
- Biography and memoir
A novel about Anna Wulf, a writer in London in the 1950s who is struggling with writer's block, a broken love affair and her disillusion with the Communist Party. She keeps separate notebooks, each for a different part of her life, including her African past, politics, and her private emotions. Around them runs a conventional narrative about Anna and her friend Molly. As the divisions between the notebooks begin to fail, Anna tries to make a whole of her experience. The book is celebrated for its experimental structure and its candid treatment of women's work, sexuality and mental strain.
Quotes
My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped. As I have said, this was not noticed.
The two women were alone in the London flat. "The point is," said Anna, as her friend came back from the telephone on the landing, "the point is, that as far as I can see, everything's cracking up."
You want me to begin a novel with The two women were alone in the London flat?
Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.